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The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two. " The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information " [ 1] is one of the most highly cited papers in psychology. [ 2][ 3][ 4] It was written by the cognitive psychologist George A. Miller of Harvard University 's Department of Psychology and published ...
That presentation, "The magical number seven, plus or minus two", was later published as a paper which went on to be a legendary one in cognitive psychology. [4] Miller moved back to Harvard as a tenured associate professor in 1955 and became a full professor in 1958, expanding his research into how language affects human cognition. [4]
In an early and influential article, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two", [25] Miller suggested that human short-term memory has a forward memory span of approximately seven plus or minus two items and that that was well known at the time (apparently originating with Wundt). Later research reported that this "magical number seven" is ...
Thus, instead of remembering 10 separate digits that are beyond the putative "seven plus-or-minus two" memory span, we are remembering four groups of numbers. [8] An entire chunk can also be remembered simply by storing the beginnings of a chunk in the working memory, resulting in the long-term memory recovering the remainder of the chunk. [4]
The digit-span test is a perfect example of a measurement for classically defined short-term memory. Essentially, if one is not able to encode the 7 plus or minus two items within a few minutes by finding an existing association for the information to be transferred into long-term memory, then the information is lost and never encoded. [22]
He researched the capacity of the working memory, discovering that people can only hold up to 7 plus or minus 2 items. He also created the term chunking when explaining how to make the most of our short-term memory. [7] Two other theorists associated with the cognitive information processing theory are Richard C. Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin ...
An item may be a number, a word, a picture, a sound, a feeling, or any single object. For example, the set A can be treated as a simple item. A description of the set A (such as "A is the set of all prime digits") is another item. An enumeration of the set A: {2, 3, 5, 7} are four items linked together in a group or set.
His experimental results suggested that humans are generally able to hold only seven plus or minus two units of information in short-term memory. [citation needed] In 1973 Simon and Chase were the first to use the term "chunk" to describe how people might organize information in short-term memory. [10]